Some notes from the interview with Kent Beck on the cargo culting software engineering practices and approaches to develop software in general.

Here are few my notes from this article:

- There is no value in copy-pasting someone else's processes and approaches e.g. Spotify-model. You have to work to develop your unique approach, because your context is different. Things that work for <companyName> won't probably work for you.

What engineering practices can other companies and startups learn from Facebook?

Nothing. People should figure out what their style is and do their style. I’ve been talking about software process for a long, long time. Something I notice is there are people who are uncomfortable taking responsibility. They want a process where they can say, “Well, hey, we executed the process. We failed, but we executed the process.”


- Job noscripts shape culture and process as well: if there's a Scrum master, ppl won't use Kanban, etc.

- You need to think ahead, how long a software would live and how many times is it used. You can plan accordingly:
- Do not overthink noscripts for limited time or usage
- Take time to design long-term systems

#culture

There are quite a few ways to run PostreSQL on Kubernetes. Just to name a few: a Helm chart by Bitnami, the Crunchy operator, an operator by Zalando, I think Percona has one as well.

Here’s yet another operator - StackGres.

It’s open-source, but has paid enterprise support if you need it. I haven’t tried it personally, but it this person from Reddit has and apparently is fully satisfied.

#kubernetes #databases

If you’re interested in Pulumi, here’s a tutorial on how to create a Lambda function that sends a daily email with Pulumi.

This is a nice small exercise, if you want to get familiar with the tool. Also, this tutorial uses Python, which is very popular in DevOps-ish circles.

#aws #pulumi #iac

A collection of design patterns for Python.

Python is incredibly popular in system operations world. Hope, this collection helps you to use some good practices in your Python noscripts and applications.

#python #programming

(If you don't know Ukrainian, just go to the poll below)

По HUG Kyiv і мітапам: потрібне розуміння що з ними робити.

Маю потенційних англомовних спікерів. CEO SpaceLift що мав виступити ще в березні, і чела що нещодавно написав провайдер і готовий поділитися досвідом.

Питання в наступному: чи є сенс проводити онлайн мітапи під час широкомасштабної війни чи зачекати?

Аргументи за почекати:
* не розпорошувати сили, волонтерство і фронт - це найважливіше.
* І так в багатьох нема сил щось робити а тут ще мітапи.

Аргументи за проводити:
* це все не закінчиться за місяць-два, тому треба інвестувати в професійний ріст (майбутнє) вже зараз, бо це генеруватиме додатковий потік кешу і т.д. і т.п. що нам точно не буде зайвим
* У багатьох повномасштабна війна вже перейшла зі стану шоку у стан "на фоні" (коли ракети не фігачать) або у повсякденність (якщо на передку), тож впринципі можна повертати +- звичні активності

Аргументи і думки на тему прошу в тред, а також проголосуйте в опитуванні нижче, будь ласка

​​Just got a HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate to be sure that I don't miss anything important.

A quick recap of how I did it:
1. Saw HashiCorp Terraform Associate Certification Course - Pass the Exam! from a guy that learns TF just to be certified and make this course :) On x1.25-x2 speed
(Note: in 1st hour he describe comp. science theory in the worst possible way, confusing the use of terms and their meanings. So better google it, Wikipedia describes them better)
2. Test me by free test at exampro.co/terraform. (Feel free to use 10minutemail.com)
3. Click Register to the exam here, read all articles, add mail that is used as primary in Github to Credly, buy exam, cleanup workspace
4. Fight with PSI Security Browser for half-our before it became happy about working process on a laptop, number of monitors. Record video of the floor, table, whole room, myself... That's why you should start connecting 30 minutes before the exam start.
5. Pass the exam, get a badge on Credly, and email with a passing score.

About exam complexity, from youtube comments:
> Just a heads up, i watched this over 2 days (skipped most of the hands on), and I took the cert today and passed with a 93%. Everything on the test was in this video. I've used terraform maybe once before.

IMHO, that cert can be a plus for Intern/Junior position, but not above. Sadly, still no Professional exam for TF.

#terraform #certification

Just like there are road sign books, there are road sign articles. This is the type that provides rather not the answers to particular questions, but avenues to approach those answers.

Here are a couple of such articles on the micro service architecture by the same author:
- Microservice Architecture and its 10 Most Important Design Patterns
- Effective Microservices: 10 Best Practices

Each of these articles provides a list of patterns and good practices that one can use building their architecture. And even though I do not agree with all the statements there, I still believe these are great lists to get yourself familiar with some core concepts and make a personal roadmap if you want learn more about building micro service architectures.

Some of these concepts are gonna be pretty familiar to anyone, who’s working with micro services on a daily basis, but it’s important to revisit core concepts from time to time, because you never know, what have you forgotten.

#architectire #microservices

Did you know that there’s a database of databases?

You can find various useful information on each DB on that website. I wish you could search this website by features (data model, support for joins, concurrency control, etc.). However, you can only search by name.

P.S. if you want to add a database to the list, you can write this guy.

#databases

Awesome Cold Showers list is basically a list of counter-arguments to the popular tech beliefs like “Static Typing reduces bugs”, “all the software should’ve developed with Agile methodologies”, “micro service architectures are better in all the cases”.

Obviously, the list is not comprehensive. You can, ofc, extend it with a pull request. However, there are some points you can use in discussions already.

#misc

Today I want to share HashiCorp's official doc about Vault performance tuning.

I know that an official doc is not that impressive as some author's article. However, it contains a lot of useful information. Also, sometimes you have to refer to docs like this one.

Moreover, Vault is not that simple as it seems. For example, many people think that Vault is HA if you have multiple hosts, which is not in fact true, unless you have an enterprise version. Otherwise, it's just an active leader and stand by hosts.

Also, Vault's performance is very dependent on its storage backend. Therefore, tuning can also be related to that. For example, you can tweak max_parallel option if you're using AWS S3 as a backend and hitting AWS API rate limiting.

Also, I would be very glad if you can share some materials about Vault load testing with different storage backends. I've heard that PostgreSQL is the most performant, but I have no data or a research to prove it. Would be nice to read one.

After a super-quick research, I was only able to find this article on how to setup benchmark tests for Vault.

Although, here's a benchmark for Vault's integrated storage

#hashicorp #vault #performance

🔥 Great news from AWS Tech Conference #StandWithUkraine!

Dr. Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer at Amazon will be our keynote! We’ll have a fireside chat with Dr. Werner on Next-Gen Cloud Computing.

📌 We are also going to discuss scaling AWS Infrastructure, enabling public API in days with AWS Athena, AWS WAF & Firewall Manager, Serverless patterns, IT transformation in multi-cloud era, choosing the right data store and more!

You’ll meet 12 awesome speakers from AWS team, AWS heroes, AWS User Group Leaders and, of course, Ukrainian AWS professionals will share knowledge and experience.

When? June 30
Where? Online

👉 How can you join?
Register for free OR you can buy a charity ticket*.
*All profit will go to Ukrainian charity funds.

Join us & spread the word 💙💛
It’s going to be AWSome!

Yesterday I made a post about Vault. I have incorrectly put that the open source version of Vault is not HA. This is a mistake. What I meant is that with a community version only one node actively processes the connections, while others don’t. Though, this doesn’t contradict a definition of “high availability”.

However, this installation is HA. So, you can use the open source version without any major concerns (as long as your storage backend supports HA!).

Many thanks to our subscribers, who spotted this mistake! Mistakes happen and I very much appreciate when you help finding them!

You can read more about Vault’s HA configuration in the official documentation.

#hashicorp #vault

Microsoft published a ~30-page report on early lessons of the cyberwar

Link above is a blog post. The full report is in the attachment.

#security

Kubernetes is incredibly popular nowadays. It's popular to the extent that it's kinda became a boring technology already. Thus, it's not a surprise that many companies use it and therefore ask for an experience with it from the candidates.

However, it may be hard to get any hands-on experience unless your current company is using it already (which is relevant to any tool or technology, TBH).

There are obviously many books and courses out there, but today I want to share a great open source tutorial from by
Omer Berat Sezer. This tutorial is hosted on GitHub, it's totally free and open source, and it has not only some purely theoretical materials, but also practical labs that you can do on your localhost.

BTW, check out his other repositories as well. He has some other tutorials like this there as well. For example, tutorials on Docker and Pytorch.

#kubernetes #learning #tutorials

​​Finally, ​​​​​​​​HUG Kyiv #14: Terraform!

What:
- SpaceLift as CI/CD for your infra
- How to write a Terraform provider

Who:
- Marcin Wyszynski, Chief Product Officer @ Spacelift
- Pato Arvizu, Leader @ HUG New York

When: Tuesday 19th July, 18:30 (Kyiv TZ)
Where: Online
Language: English

Please, register here

#event

Videos from the AWS Tech Conference #StandWithUkraine are available now on YouTube!

I personally want to check out a fireside chat with Dr. Werner Vogels - CTO of Amazon. However, there are a lot of other cool speakers as well!

#slides

I have a couple of AWS accounts for testing purposes and I also have an anxiety that some automated tests won’t clean up after themselves or that an account may get hacked, which would result in a huge bill.

Well, I’m not alone. In fact, a friend of mine once got a multi-thousand bill from AWS when he forgot to shut down something for his pet project. AWS nullified the bill once he contacted support, but you know, they don’t had to.

In this article. Corey Quinn argues that AWS “free tier” is broken. Yet, it shouldn’t be so. Both GCP and Azure (even Oracle!) have implemented free tier concept better.

Corey is a consultant, who helps companies reduce their cloud spendings. So, he knows what he’s talking about.

#aws

A small article about how to reverse engineer Docker images.

It provides some theoretical information on how Docker images are built as well as some practical tools to reverse engineer Docker images yourself.

Probably, not something you do every day, but I can recall a few times when I had search for a Dockerfile to understand how an image works. I wish I knew these tools back then!

#docker

I’m not a Ruby developer and even though this was the first language after Bash I used to write some noscripts for commercial usage, I don’t use it any more. Still have a couple of stale repositories with some Ruby code on GitHub, lol.

With this been said, you can imagine that I don’t keep an eye on what’s going on in that ecosystem. Obviously, some people do. So, today I want to share with you a Ruby Changes website which is a curated digest of the recent developments of that language.

I’m sharing it with you not because I’ve suddenly decided to switch to Ruby, but because of the story behind the latest update, that can easily make one cry.

#ruby